Quotes from Charles Martin

Never judge someone by their relatives.

Once a heart breaks…it doesn't just grow back. It's not a lizard's tail. It's more like a huge stained glass that shattered into a million pieces, and it's not going back together. Least not the way it was. You can mush it all into one piece, but that doesn't make it a window. That makes it a pile of broken colored glass. Shattered hearts don't mend and they don't heal. They just don't work that way.

Reese, your books might not tell you this, so I will. Every heart has two parts, the part that pumps and the part that loves. If you're going to spend your life fixing broken hearts, then learn about both. You can't just fix one with no concern for the other.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but if you want to hurt someone...way down deep, use words.

Love has its own communication. It's the language of the heart, while it has never been transcribed, has no alphabet, and can't be heard or spoken by voice, it is used by every human on the planet. It is written on our souls, scripted by the finger of God, and we can hear, understand, and speak it with perfection long before we open our eyes for the first time.

He picked up one of Lorna's roses and set it in my lap. Here. I picked it up and smelled it. He poked me in the shoulder. See what I mean? Thorns don't stop you from sniffing. Or putting them in a vase on the kitchen table. You work around them.... Cause the rose is worth it... Think what you'd miss.

the mountain between us is one i cannot climb .

Forgiveness is a tough thing. Both in the offering…and the accepting.

He thinks the sun comes up just to hear him crow.

You take the bad with the good, Rise up through it. Live in the mist of it. It's the bad that lets you know ho good the good really is. Don't let the bad leave you thinking like there ain't any good. There is, and lots of it, too.

love is worth doing. No matter how much it hurts.

We're all fallen people in a fallen world. Where does a man find healing amid so many broken places? How does he find love in the ruins and vine-wrapped shattered pieces of his own soul? Because love's springing up through the rocks.

loving somebody gets better the more you do it.

I think when two people really love each other...way down deep...like where the souls sleep and dreams happen, where pain can't live 'cause there's nothing for it to feed on...then a wedding is a bleeding together of those two souls. Like two rivers running together. All that water becoming the same water. Mine did that.

forgive your enemies...it messes with their heads.

You can put your boots in the oven, but that doesn't make them biscuits. - You can say whatever you want about something, but that doesn't change what it is.

The library was magical because every time I walked through the door, there were literally thousands of voices ready and willing to have a conversation with me. I walked through the door, stared at all those stacks and bindings, and whispered, Tell me a story.

this…living with a broken heart is living half dead, and that doesn't mean you're half alive. It means you're half dead. And…that's no way to live.

Marry the man who's going to walk with you through the next fifty or sixty years. Open doors, hold your hand, make your coffee, rub lotion on the cracks of your feet, put you up on a pedestal where you belong. Is he marrying your face and your bottle-blond hair, or will he love you when you look like whoever you're going to look like in fifty years?

If your knuckles are bloodier than your knees,then you're fighting the wrong battle.

If anything in the universe reflects the fingerprint of God, it is the human heart...It derives no benefit from the blood it pumps making it the most unselfish of organs...it is also the most courageous and faithful. (124, 126) - Reese

The river never changes. it may alter it's path a bit, but it never changes. It's us who change. We come back here and we're are different. Not it. Form can't be extracted from the essence like some broth reduction. This river's taught me a good bit. Probably why I don't leave here. It winds, weaves, snakes around. Rarely goes the same twice. But, in the end, it always ends up in the same place and the gift is never the same. ...it's the journey that matters.

I'm not leaving you. Not going it alone. Not looking at the memory of you everytime I close my eyes.

but maybe life is like that - you never know when something that's been hidden is going to rise up and bite you, or glow with a golden hue.